The Compliance and Security Connection

Aberdeen Identifies Specific Actions to Improve IT Service Delivery

As I started discussing yesterday, Aberdeen Group has recently released a report on ITSM, entitled IT Transforms itself into a Service.

Yesterday we discussed some of the attributes of the Best-in-Class organizations among the 300 Aberdeen had surveyed. Today, I want to share their recommendations for bringing your organization's performance up to the level of the other Best-in-Class organizations.

• Increase visibility into service delivery standards to align IT with business processes.
• Manage your SLAs
• Know how to measure performance
• Implement an ITIL framework now
• Look to experienced IT service providers
• Utilize creative SLA agreements and policies
• Continue to focus on transformation instead of installation
• Continue to optimize your environment around process, performance, and analytic tools

Needless to say, the report expands a bit on each of these points, but the bottom line is to move your organization towards a framework like ITIL. It's important to remember that is not a question that can be solved simply with an investment in more technology - the company must be committed to changing their business processes and investing in the ongoing education of their employees so that everyone understands what the business has to gain from following the processes.

Has your organization adopted a model around IT service management? Where are you in the process? What benefits have you seen from employing IT service management? What roadblocks have you run across?

Share your stories...you don't need to name names, just give an honest view of what you've found in your own first-hand experience.

Contributed by Mark Tordoff

Aberdeen Group Report Identifies Value ITSM Provides

The Aberdeen Group published a report a few weeks back on ITSM: IT Transforms itself into a Service. In this report, Aberdeen shares their findings from a survey of almost 300 different organizations.

Today, I'd like to share some of the findings Aberdeen found that distinguish the Best-in-Class organizations from the pack. Tomorrow, I'll share their suggested steps for achieving Best-in-Class results.

Here are some of the key findings that made the Best-in-Class stand out:

• They achieve 86% of their Service Level Agreement (SLA) goals
• IT services are delivered on time 85% of the time
• IT processes experience 83% efficiency
• They are 74% more likely than those classified as laggards to have asset management and technology refresh plans in place
• They are 61% more likely than all others to have a cross-functional team to steer IT policy
• They are 58% more likely to have a framework to guide IT service delivery and improvement
• 28% of the Best-in-Class dedicate 20% of their overall IT budget to ITSM
• 54% of Best-in-Class are currently using ITIL as an ITSM solution

What is of interest is these statistics reinforce points that were brought up by State Street's Joseph Kennedy and Mary Kay's Steve Moore at last month's itSMF conference. Both of them alluded to the inability of most IT organizations to deliver projects successfully and on time. Kennedy shared statistics showing that nearly 70% of IT projects fail to meet expectations. Moore focused on the cost and labor overruns usually associated with IT projects.

Both were using these statistics to explain why IT service management is so important for delivering business services predictably. Tomorrow, we'll see what Aberdeen suggests for getting there.

Contributed by Mark Tordoff

The Connection between Business Service Management and Pink Cadillacs

One of the presentations I attended at the recent itSMF USA conference in Charlotte, North Carolina had the intriguing title of "How does earning a Pink Cadillac relate to BSM/ITSM." With a title like that, I had to check it out.

The presenter was Steve Moore, technology leader at Mary Kay, the $2.2 billion Texas-based cosmetics and fragrance wholesaler.

Moore shared that, in many organizations, IT service management is "unpredictable" and is often solved by "thowing people at the problem." He said IT needs to start asking questions like:

• How do I prioritize my IT staff based on business priorities?
• What effect do IT changes or failures have on the business?
• What is the cost to the business?

As part of Mary Kay's efforts to provide better service to its customers, the 1.6 million independent beauty consultants, Moore and the rest of the IT department have focused on developing a Business Service Management approach to IT.

Moore described the growth from infrastructure management to IT service management to business service management as the pursuit of "one master version of the truth." To overcome the challenges to adopting BSM, Mary Kay followed four key steps:

1. Link the effort to the existing company direction (standardize)
2. Gain an in-depth understanding and consolidation of like processes (change process)
3. Consolidate systems
4. Educate (ITIL Foundation was a key resource)

Another important tip that was echoed in an earlier presentation by Phyllis Drucker from AutoNation.com, was to not try to tackle every aspect of ITIL initially. Like Drucker, the team at Mary Kay focused on Configuration, Change, Service Impact and Incident Management during the beginning stages.

One cautionary note Moore shared for any IT professional looking to undertake a BSM or ITSM initiative  was to educate your executives on the terminology. Be able to not only define the terms, but be able to articulate the opportunities that can be provided for the business (see the two earlier questions to know what those opportunities might be).

On a related note, I wasn't the only one who thought this year's itSMF event was an exceptional opportunity to gain insight into some real-world examples of how to add value to the business through IT Service Management. Check out Denise Dubie's post on Networkworld.com today. By the looks of it, Denise and I were in a lot of the same sessions together!

Contributed by Mark Tordoff

Making IT Service Management Practical

I have been participating in itSMF USA's annual conference in Charlotte, North Carolina since Sunday evening. More than 2000 IT professionals are in town this week to learn more about implementing or enhancing the processes surrounding IT Service Management.

Yesterday, I attended two sessions that really took the concept of IT Service Management, which can often come across as being somewhat theoretical, and brought it into practical, real-world terms.

The first session was given by Joseph Kennedy, vice president of information technology at State Street Corporation. The focus of Kennedy's presentation covered a lot of ground, but was particularly aimed at helping show attendees how to "sell" the concept of IT service management internally.

To begin the presentation, Kennedy shared a survey reflecting the cost of downtime per hour for different industries. The statistics were sobering, revealing that costs for a single hour of downtime generally run is excess of six figures and exceed more than a million dollars an hour in brokerages. He shared that 70% of IT projects fail expectations, due to a combination of exceeding budget, missing project deadline, or overallocating resources to complete the project.

One aspect he stressed was the need for IT to be better able to communicate needs in a business context. IT needs to see itself as the mechanic for the business person. Just like you can call up a trusted mechanic and describe a noise and they can diagnose it from years of experience, IT needs to have the information it needs to quickly provide an answer to what the problem is, how it can be fixed, and how long it will take.

Kennedy then made the point that this is where you can make a strong case for automating configuration management. In the case of State Street, they have over 6000 unique Configuration Items (CIs) to manage. With analysts like Gartner's Ronni Colville stating that 60% of unplanned downtime is caused by user error or environmental factors, it is critical to quickly be able to identify changes in those CIs, yet impossible to do it in a timely manner manually.

Unfortunately, Kennedy also shared that only a third of IT budgets are to fund enhancements like automated tools. The balance is just to maintain and support current infrastructure. As Kennedy said, configuration management is a repetitive process and "nobody I know wants to do it."

By adopting configuration management, Kennedy and his team have seen benefits in:

• Resource improvements
• Fewer outages (a considerable ROI based on the figures he shared)
• Greater transparency to what's happening in the environment
• Improved responsiveness ( I want to be the mechanic with the answers)

The second session featured Phyllis Drucker, director of consolidated services with AutoNation.com. She spoke on implementing ITIL on a Shoestring.

First of all, Phyllis was downright fun to listen to...she speaks with the experience of someone who has been in the trenches and learned some "unscripted" ways to succeed.

AutoNation.com has experienced tremendous growth, with over 285 individual dealers representing nearly 500 locations in the fold. As they were beginning to establish a change approval process, the first thing that needed to stop was the ability for the individual dealerships to be making system changes. Phyllis's solution? Literally pull the plug.

She disconnected them from the system so they were forced to call and request the change. The services required to operate the business remained intact, but she quickly was able to establish control over global changes until their was more technology in place to support a more formal change process.

Drucker related that when AutoNation decided to implement IT Service Management processes based on ITIL, their only investment financially was sending staff to be formally trained. Outside of that, the criteria was:

• no additional staff could be hired
• the processes must map to the existing organization
• no additional funding

The benefits AutoNation.com saw with their shoestring approach included:

• no organizational change meant little upset to staff
• the implementation was scaled to fit the organization
• staff was trained in process development
• staff learned to look honestly at gaps
• team had a sense of ownership
• no impact on operations

As you might expect, there were challenges along the way. Here are some of the attitudes and barriers Drucker and her team had to overcome:

• relationships are built in a day - many people had to work cross-functionally for the first time
• who was going to be the champion
• how would we have enough time
• what's in it for me
• I have more important things to do
• Just let me get my job done

In concluding her presentation, Drucker was able to share some significant ROI related to their adoption of IT Service Management processes. In their NT servers, availability went from 98.6 to 99.9%. Drucker had measured that every .1% of downtime was the equivalent of 4.4 hours. With an hours worth of downtime costing $146 per location, this improvement alone is saving in excess of $100 K annually.

In the help desk area, process improvements have allowed them to reduce headcount from 300 to 85 and maintain a $25 per service desk call rate.

As I mentioned, Phyllis was a great presenter. One of the final questions she addressed in the Q&A section was on how you keep people from subverting the change process by requesting a change to be handled as an emergency. Phyllis stated that they report on emergencies that don't fall within the typical change cycle "poor planning." Drucker stated that the number of emergency requests dropped considerably when they knew their requests would be identified as "poor planning" in the report metrics IT was generating! Now that's change management!!!

Contributed by Mark Tordoff